Beginning Domain Tip: Flip Dot Coms, Build Out Other TLDS

If someone were to ask me to explain how to make money with domains (and nobody is) I would tell them this.  ONLY try and flip dot coms and try and buy good keyword  in the other tlds and build them out.  As simple as it sounds it only took me 10 years to actually practice what I preach.

The reasoning behind my statement is simple.  If a person wants to build a business on the Internet they want to build it on a dot com. It’s not to say that aren’t some good companies built on other tlds but if they had the ability to get the dot com I guarantee they would rather have built it there.  With want comes value.  Due to this want of dot coms,  the prices continue to climb and will increase for the foreseeable future as more and more names become permanent domains of corporations and are taken off the available list.  This gradual rise in prices provides a nice arena to flip domains.  Yes it’s going to cost more money but the risk in dot coms is much less than the rest of the tlds.   People settle for the other tlds.

One of the biggest mistakes in new domain investors is thinking that buying a bunch of alternative tlds is better than investing in one dot com.  Before you know it you have a group of names that have little value.  What happens next is you find a strong name and complain you don’t have enough money.  If you added the total amount of money you spent on the poor names you realize you could have purchased the good name.  All you needed was patience.   But don’t think I’m bashing the other TLDs, there is also great value in them as well.

Let me start by saying, there is certainly opportunity to flip other alt tld domains.  There is just more risk involved and the sales aren’t as frequent.  Another BIG negative is 99% of your sales go to other domainer investors not end users.  But the big opportunity is development.  For the most part, Google doesn’t care if it’s dot net, info, org, or us.   (See Morgan or DomainQuestions which country codes are more difficult to rank).  Because Google doesn’t care, it gives you the opportunity to buy great keyword domains with lesser cost tlds and use them to rank higher in your searches.   You can buy a keyword domain like bookbags.org much much cheaper than bookbag.com and still compete head to head on a level playing field.  So if the domain ranks as well why does it sell for less?  I can answer that easily.  Name your favorite baseball team.   I’m pretty sure you named a major league team.  There are hundreds of other professional baseball teams out there.  Triple A, AA, and A ball, even foreign teams.  All are great to attend and cost much less but you still named the ones that are the most popular.  You could say they are popular because they have the best talent in the world but they have the best talent in the world because they came first.  Dot com came first and therefore rules the roost.

So go out there and make some money but don’t fool yourself on how you’re going to do it.  For every guy that tells you he bought a $60 domain and sold it for $2000 (did that last week but it was a dot com) are the thousands of other stories of buying a hundred $60 domains and not selling a one (I have over 100 domains with cobwebs on them).